Fair point but I'm talking about a real "tail, horns and cloven hoof" demon.

LK

He may well have been as smart as he thought (I'm not saying that is the case for sure, mind) but turns out others were smart enough, and more knowledgeable in the ways that mattered.

Hans Reiser is a good example. Man is unquestionably very smart. However, he had the geek hubris that I call SMFU, Smartest Motherfucker in the Universe syndrome. He figured he was so much smarter than everyone else, he could easily get away with his crime. Turns out that the police have some smart people too, and those people know a lot more about criminal investigation than he did.

Right in that yes, they already have a lot of evidence, and are just working to seal the deal. They like to have everything in a row and an overwhelming amount of evidence before going to trial.

Wrong about the contempt thing. If you look it up in the US you find out that the courts have decided the 5th amendment applies to passwords. So you can keep your mouth shut and they can't compel you to hand over a password. If it is locked with something physical like a key fob or fingerprint, that you have to hand over. Basically if something is solely in your mind, they can't compel you to hand that over if it can be used against you.

The FBI may not be all up to date on the latest technologies and they aren't great at dealing with things purely in the digital world. However they are one of, if not the best investigative organizations in the world. They have a lot of experience investigating crimes of all kinds, often committed by experienced criminal organizations that are quite clever.

So there's a good chance if they are interested in getting you, they will. They are quite literally professionals at it, and they institutionally learn from their experience. You very well may know a lot more about computers than they do, but they almost certainly know way more about criminal investigations than you do.

What I am presuming the GP is going for as an analogy is that there was a real Saint Nicholas, but that there is also a false legend surrounding the real man that is far grander and more common.

Not perhaps the best analogy.

"I believe that the Earth is getting warmer, however I do not find sufficient evidence to show that this will be a net bad thing for humanity. Further I do not believe that the proposed measures are the wisest course of action, and we should be investigating alternatives such as geoengineering. In any case we should not act yet, as we do not have a solid enough model of what will happen and the net impact on humanity."

They can easily find a way to say "I support science, but think that this issue isn't clear cut."

Goes double if the people who are doing the vote try and make it a black and white issue. If they try to make it an issue where you either have to support everything they say, or you are an evil denier of all science, it'll be much easier for people to abstain and have a good argument.

Science is just a process for knowing about the natural universe. It never gives us guidance on what we should do, it only tells us what is, and lets us predict what will be. What to do is always policy and politics. You can have a matter in which there is complete agreement on facts and theory, yet a disagreement on what we should do about it. While a solid scientific theory backed by good facts could tell us what is likely to happen if we take a certain action (or if we do not take an action) we then have to judge that result and how we value it. We have to look at the benefits and costs (everything has costs) and decide if we believe it is the best course of action, and on that point people may disagree.

That is, I think, a flaw many people make in talking about the AGW argument. They believe that since the facts (things like temperature and CO2 measurements) and the theory (the causal explanation of the relation of the facts) is solid in their estimation, that the course of action they believe should be taken is therefore scientific. That because there is a scientific theory at the core of what is happening, that means the conclusion they have reached is also scientific.

That's just not the case. Policy and politics aren't science. They can, and should, use science heavily to have good information as to the policy that is decided upon, but that policy is always a human construction, always a value judgement.

How is that self-controlled navigation working - image recognition based on ground features? Because otherwise, they're navigating using GPS or the equivalent. Interfere with that by saturating them with the same freqs, and they'll have no idea where they are. Sure some sort of inertial navigation system might be viable, but probably not with the precision needed to get some small drone as close to its specific target as such small devices would need to be (presuming they're not just spraying bio-hazards and the like over a football stadium or some such).

It soon won't be, though. But I reckon waiting for this stuff to show up would be kind of a setback for a four-year college degree.

That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your monitor's scan rate is the limiting factor.

However that's not so easy to do with new games that push the envelope. You can't just throw tons of hardware at them because they are already pushing the high end hardware that is out. So efficiency matters. If the driver is slow, you are going to have poor performance.

Further there is the issue of crashing. AMD drivers seem to have a tendency to 'asplode when you start throwing some of the new features at them. These features are there for a reason, they allow greater detail, more efficient rendering, new visuals, etc. If you can't support them, then that's an issue.

If you want a real test, fire up Metro Last Light Redux, see how that works.

I despise Romney, I have never voted for him and unless he's running against a demon I won't ever vote for him.

That being said, the "Binders full of women" controversy was bullshit. It was a manufactured controversy. It was in line with the Alinsky method of turning your opponents strength into a weakness and using ridicule as a weapon.

Romney has spent the past 30 years making himself acceptable to the center-left contingent of American politics and I have no doubt that he seriously looked at every qualified female prospect when he was recruiting. The operatives in service to the Democrat National Committee had to do something to de-emphasize the fact that Romney was much better on women in the workplace than they were.

LK

"Oh that's an old version, we aren't going to patch the bug." Really? That's an acceptable response that something that's 3 years old is too old to patch? But somehow, taking 100 days to patch a product that's 5 years old (in 7's case) is too long? Much easier to deal with patch issues if you just declare you only support the latest greatest and require everyone to upgrade all the time, no matter the issues.

MS's response is particularly understandable given the complexity of doing regression testing on the wide variety of hardware, software, and patch sets the patch might need to be applied against. If they released it and it caused issues, well then people would cry even more about how shitty they were for not testing it.

I think you are right about the mud slinging/political office: What with Chrome books Google now wishes to directly attack MS. They want to make Windows look bad, and thus make their own product look good by comparison. This isn't motivated by being a good citizen, it is motivated by something else.

For that matter one can get all conspiracy theorist and say maybe they chose their reporting date knowing MS's patch cycle to try and create just such a situation.

Aldrin is a hero, the hoaxer is a very annoying moron. While technically that shouldn't matter, justice should be truly blind, it isn't. Nobody wanted to find Aldrin guilty of any wrong doing, so any plausible explanation was taken to make sure he got off.

No, just someone who doesn't like whiny people who think that constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and assembly should only apply to them, and not to people with whom they have an ideological difference. Are you really at a loss to come up with a single association, group, union, club, or other entity that you support that has - as a group - said its piece to a legislator about something that group finds important? If you can't think of a single one, then you're much too poorly informed to have an opinion on this matter. Or to vote, as far as that goes.

Because the same PR firms aren't ONLY putting together lobbying efforts that go directly to legislators, regulators and executives - they also put together expensive, long-running PR campaigns aimed the voters themselves. Is this where you say that they shouldn't be allowed to run ads in newspapers, or use direct mail or the web to deliver their messages? Why?